In the health-care industry, diagnostic testing of physiological or biological samples, such as blood, is a routine, and often cumbersome, task, with physicians requiring a wide variety of specialized tests on patients' samples to support their diagnoses. With in-patient and critical care settings, the frequency of blood sampling places additional demands on hospital staff.
To satisfy this ever increasing demand for analytical data from samples, sophisticated chemical analyzers have been developed over the past 20 years to perform a multiplicity of physical and chemical tests on specially prepared patients' samples. Sample volume requirements have also been reduced substantially, to 100 μL or less for some tests.